Odds are that you own a smartphone. Odds are also that you spend very little time actually talking on it. (Best way to show your age: Leave a voicemail.)

Rather, you use all sorts of apps to take and share pictures, read books and news articles, make restaurant reservations, find directions and potential mates, and oodles of other things. For a long time you have known that the term smartphone is a misnomer: It lets you do more than just make and take calls.

Still with me?

Now apply that same model to a different context: internal collaboration hubs. I’m talking about Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, and others. What if that hub could do much more than just replace e-mail?

Much, much more.

It turns out that the hub can is up to the bill and, even better, doesn’t require users to write any code. Installing a third-party app in a hub is every bit as easy as downloading Instagram for your iPhone or TikTok for your Galaxy F52 5G.

What if a collaboration hub could do much more than just replace e-mail?

Case in point: Want to access Asana via Slack? No problem. In this way, the hub allows you to bring together a bunch of different tools into a single gestalt. And that is the Hub-Spoke Model of Collaboration.

Simon Says

The sooner that your organizations, departments, and groups start thinking about hubs and spokes, the more prepared they’ll be for the future of work.